Singapore marketplace scores funding to buy and sell real-time data

The DatastreamX team. Photo credit: DatastreamX.

DatastreamX, a Singapore-based online marketplace for buying and selling real-time data, has scored pre-series A funding, raising US$456,000 from venture capital firm Wavemaker Partners, an incubator partner of Singapore’s National Research Foundation. JFDI and an undisclosed angel investor participated in the round as well.

DatastreamX’s marketplace contains data for weather, traffic, finance, and more. These types of data streams are available elsewhere, but DatastreamX brings them together in one place. It helps businesses find streams they’re looking for as well as make money by selling their own data on the marketplace.

With the fresh funding, the startup will look into how it can help companies create useful products based on their data and bring them on its platform. “We’re building tools on three different fronts: creation of data products, assessment, and consumption,” CEO Mike Davie tells Tech in Asia.

The startup is also staffing up on sales and marketing people as well as data scientists and data engineers. “We want to develop a strong team of enterprise people,” Mike says, although he admits attracting the right talent to Singapore is still a significant challenge for an early-stage company.

Data training

DatastreamX offers consultancy and training services for companies who want to learn more about putting their data to use. Industries with troves of non-personal data, like real estate or advertising, can share information that has cross-border and cross-industry value.

But companies in those spaces don’t necessarily know how to get value out of that data, so this has also become a big part of DatastreamX’s business. The startup provides an efficient way of doing that and helps reduce the associated costs.

DatastreamX offers consultancy and training services for companies who want to learn more about putting their data to use.

Mike says there are around 400 data vendors and 500 buyers on the marketplace, with 208 products listed. The team hopes to reach annual recurring revenue (ARR) of US$702,000 by the time it’s ready for its series A, around Q4 of 2017. ARR is a metric that subscription-based software-as-a-service companies use sometimes, indicating the normalized value of recurring revenue. The startup doesn’t reveal any other specifics in this regard.

For the coming year, DatastreamX also wants to create replicable use cases for the different industries and companies it serves. For example, financial data that helps fintech companies is currently a big part of the marketplace.

Particularly interesting use cases come from non-personal mobility data – understanding how people move and behave in cities. This could be useful to industries from healthcare to marketing. Singapore’s Smart Nation project will rely heavily on this kind of data to create connected services for people, like healthcare-related internet of things services and universal internet connectivity.

DatastreamX previously raised US$368,000 in seed funding from undisclosed private investors. It’s a graduate of JFDI’s startup accelerator.

Converted from Singapore dollars. US$1 = S$1.42